The interviewer opens the conversation by saying, “Tell me about yourself.”
Your friends turn to you at dinner and say, “What are you up to these days?”
A potential investor says, “What does your startup do?”
All of these are openings for an elevator pitch of some type. So, what exactly is an “elevator pitch”? An elevator pitch is a concise description of a person, situation, company, or other subject that answers a few key questions about the subject in question: who, what, how, why, and possibly when. It should be thought of as a blank canvas that allows you to share information in an organized and informative manner, roughly in the time it takes to ride an elevator to your destination (hence the commonly used phrase).
By its nature, a well-crafted elevator pitch is concise and has a narrative arc, meaning it has a clear opening, body, and closing. Ideally, it should be memorable to the listener, perhaps because of an interesting, embedded story and/or because of your confident, articulate delivery. And it should be relevant to the listener. While you might be a passionate collector of Panamanian airmail stamps from the 1940s, the person interviewing you for a software engineering role might wonder what that has to do with coding. Which means you will have missed an opportunity to create a natural segue to follow-up questions. However, they might be intrigued to learn that you got hooked on writing code by developing a video game that went viral on your college campus. That would surely lead to additional, relevant questions.
“I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have the time to write a short one.” – Mark Twain
This is admittedly a lot to cram into 60–90 seconds. Which is why you can’t wing it. It turns out that being highly organized, informative, memorable, relevant, and concise takes work.
And as with many things, excellence requires preparation and practice.
One last point: an elevator pitch might not always be delivered in its entirety. Your interview might not start with the softball question above. That’s OK – the key points in your elevator pitch can be disaggregated and used in answers to other questions.
“Tell me about a time you got excited.”
“During my senior year in college I created a video game that went viral…”
“What motivates you?”
“Building things, which is why I find it so rewarding to write software that solves problems…”
Time to get started – what’s your story? Write it down. Organize it, refine it, condense it, and practice delivering it. Your audience will be glad you did.
